


Ben Solo & The Castle of Naboo

by Greyrey-lo (Punkpoemprose)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Movie AU, Movie: Kariosutoro no Shiro | The Castle of Cagliostro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25985977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punkpoemprose/pseuds/Greyrey-lo
Summary: A Lupin III & The Castle of Cagliostro AU for the 2020 Reylo Readers & Writers Prompt Exchange "Let's Go to the Movies".Ben Solo, the international criminal formerly known as Kylo Ren, has recently managed the score of a lifetime with childhood frenemy turned partner in crime Poe Dameron. It's looking like easy street for the pair, and Ben thinks that maybe he's finally done something "big" enough to change his path in life. Too bad their millions turn out to be elaborate fakes. When Ben's curiosity over the fake bills leads back to his past, he'll need all the tricks his father taught him to save his skin, and that of a mysterious runaway bride. Can the gentleman thieves and their "friends", on both sides of the law, save the day, a country, and maybe the whole world?
Relationships: Finn/Rose Tico, Kaydel Ko Connix/Poe Dameron, Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Let's Go to the Movies - Reylo Readers & Writers Prompt Exchange





	Ben Solo & The Castle of Naboo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cheekylady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheekylady/gifts).



> Hello cheekylady! I chose your "Miyazaki movie" prompt and decided to go with this gem from his early career! It's a favorite of mine and one I haven't seen anyone write an AU for it yet so I thought it might be fun! Hopefully you've seen the film, but if you haven't I've written the fic to work without knowledge of the original plot. I hope you like Ben as a grumpy Lupin & Poe as a flirty Jigen.

Ben drove on, whipping the small car in and out of traffic as the man in the seat beside him was rapidly busying himself with throwing thousands of bills out the window, plastering the windshields of the men pursuing them. As per the usual they’d managed to find themselves between a rock and a hard place, but Ben was more concerned with figuring out the answer to a question he’d been asking himself since they’d left the Canto Bight Casino than he was with outrunning their pursuers. Afterall, they’d been through tougher scrapes with smarter people pissed at them.

“What a waste,” Poe said with a sigh as he emptied the last suitcase of cash out the window and fell into the seat beside Ben, “Just our luck that it would all be counterfeit.”

Ben sharply turned the wheel, trusting the bills on their pursuers’ windshields would be enough to keep them from noticing the single car wooded road he was turning onto. His car a vintage two seat TIE Spider, darker than the night they were driving through, blended in well enough amongst the trees that he risked slowing down enough to watch the Kanjiklub speed by, assuming they’d gone down the highway instead of turning off on the barely noticeable side road.

“I wonder if they even knew it was fake.”

From what his father had always said about the gang, he thought not. " _You know you can't trust those little freaks!_ " They certainly weren’t criminal masterminds at any rate, and he certainly didn’t think that they’d be running a counterfeiting ring with fakes as good as those were. He’d even been fooled at first glance, and he had an eye for that sort of thing.

“Probably not,” he said with a sigh, content enough that they weren’t being followed to flick the headlights back on. “They’re a bit like you Dameron, head for girls and drinking, but not so much in the planning.”

“Ouch Solo, that one really hurt.”

Ben watched as Poe mimed being shot next to him. He still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to end up with the moron as a partner. They’d hated each other as kids, but when Ben had stumbled his way into his father’s line of work instead of his mothers, Poe had somehow glued himself to his side. Sometimes he still wondered whether his mom had goaded him into it. Poe had been the one to get in trouble all the time as a kid, and Leia had always been fond of him, so Ben couldn’t deny the possibility that after their falling out, she’d offered Poe some kind of bribe to keep her suddenly criminal son in line.

“Sticks and stones Poe. Shake it off, we’ve got places to be and I’m not dealing with you in the car for eight hours with a wounded ego.”

“Eight hours?”

“We’re heading for Naboo.”

* * *

Poe was still expressing his intense displeasure at Ben’s plan when the sun came up few miles shy of the Naboo border. Or at least he was expressing his displeasure at what he knew of Ben’s plan. Really Ben wasn’t sure if he’d call it a plan at all. It was more a hunch and an idea, but it was worth investigating if nothing else.

He’d seen a few counterfeiting operations as good as, or at least almost as good as the one he’d just wasted a day dumping bills from, and while he knew with some certainty it wasn’t related to one of those operations, he could feasibly see it being related to the other. That it meant he’d have to return to the one place he never wanted to go back to was an unfortunate consequence of his curiosity.

“You can’t seriously think this is a good idea. I mean, it can’t be Han’s work right? So why go back to Naboo?”

“Because there’s only one other person who could have done this kind of work and they’re in Naboo. So grab the passports out of the…”

“Shit.”

They both felt the car jolt as the front tire blew out. They’d been lucky that the road ahead had been winding and that they’d been going rather slowly down the road, otherwise they’d have been in more trouble. Ben eased the car over to the side of the road and cut the engine with a sigh. He was having nothing but bad luck as of late.

“I’ll fix it,” Poe said, already hopping out of the car.

Ben shook his head, “Yeah, like I’d let you touch my car. There’s a reason I drive Dameron, you think you know what to do with a car, but you’ll probably stick us here for over an hour trying to figure out how to use a lug wrench. Or just try to delay us getting to the border.”

“You wreck a car joyriding one time and everyone acts like it’s the end of the world.”

Ben scoffed as he swung his door open and walked around to the front of the car to assess the damage. They’d been lucky, it looked like the issue could be solved with the spare in the trunk instead of necessitating more care and tools than they had immediately on hand.

“It was my Dad’s car. You’re lucky that ‘wreck’ is a loose term and that you’re around to have this conversation.”

He still wasn’t sure that he would have been so lucky. Han Solo had not been the most understanding of men, especially where his car was involved. _Or where his son was._ Ben had long since worked through the most pressing issues surrounding his relationship with his late father, but there were still some things that stung, and being around Poe seemed to reopen a lot of old emotional gashes he’d thought he’d let scab over.

Many years before, Han Solo had been one of the world’s best known and most infamous scoundrels and smugglers. Born and raised a street rat in Coruscant he’d managed to somehow be the only criminal in the history of International Crime to not only avoid capture, but to eventually go legit and be able to flagrantly walk in the face of Interpol officers that had been trying to capture him just weeks before.

“Legit” was always a strange way to put what his father had come he supposed, but that was what people used. His mother had a large part in that. It made it hard to arrest the husband of the sovereign leader of a small country where you didn’t have jurisdiction and didn’t want to make a scene he supposed. He’d heard the story of his parents meeting more times than he could count, and he still wasn’t sure how a Princess and a smuggler had managed to make a life together, let alone a kid. But there he stood, miles away from the border of the country they’d managed it in and acting more like his father than he could have ever imagined when the man was still alive.

Life was funny like that. Choices and non-choices leading him to being someone entirely different than he’d ever thought he’d be. _And demons chasing the whole way._

He took a moment to breathe and take in the scenery before going to the trunk to take out the tire, Poe helpfully handing him a lit cigarette through the open window of the car.

He’d forgotten how beautiful Naboo and the surrounding country could be. It was all so lush green and dotted with some of the most beautiful lakes he’d ever seen in his years traveling anywhere but home. They’d managed to break down near a mountain pass, in a field filled with swaying grasses and flowers that perfumed the air sweetly. It reminded him of his mother, of the gardens of their home, of places and times he could never really return to.

He tried to focus himself on repairing the tire, jacking up the small car with Poe’s unnecessary commentary from the other side. He’d been kind enough, at least, to leave the car once Ben started working. The replacement tire went on easy enough, all things considered, and Ben could at least appreciatively remember his fathers advice to always keep a spare tire _on the rim_ in the car for “quick changes, never know when you’ll have a flat tire and someone shooting at you”. He could all but see his mother giving Han Solo, master criminal, a disapproving swat. She’d never wanted her son to follow in his father’s footsteps. Little had she known at the time that it wasn’t even near the worst thing he could have done in his life.

“Holy shit!”

Finally getting the tire on the car, Ben lowered the jack and stood back up. Nothing quite got on his nerves like Poe’s insistence that every occasion required at least one swear word if not more. Ben’s own language was a bit colorful, but he saved the cursing for where it counted.

“Is that your favorite word today… or?”

He’d been so focused on the work on his car that he hadn’t heard the approaching car that was currently speeding up the winding road at their side. _Holy shit indeed._

It wasn’t just one car, it was two, and the first was clearly trying to outrun the second, flying along. Of course, he couldn’t be quite sure of what he was seeing given it was happening so quickly, but the first car, a little two-seater, seemed to be driven by a young woman in a… wedding dress.

“Get in!”

Ben shouted the command to Poe as he dropped the jack down and all but chucked it into the trunk, slamming it as he watched the second car, a heavier almost military looking thing, fly by containing several men with guns. Doing his best to move quickly Ben jumped into the driver’s seat and took off before Poe, always a bit more relaxed and without a hurry, had his door closed.

They caught up to the second car quickly, Ben driving like a mad man to catch up. He knew trouble when he saw it, and while he certainly had come into his father’s career path, he also tried to match both his parent’s penchant for doing the right thing. Poe, of course, was right on board. He liked to think of their criminal exploits as something akin to robin hood’s acts. Ben was sure he’d never see himself as anything other than the crook he was, but when he wasn’t annoying the hell out of him over it, Ben was happy enough to let Poe act like the charming rogue. It took the sting out of the thought that he might be ruining his life too.

“Who are we helping?” Poe asked, “The girl right?”

Ben replied in an annoyed grunt. It was an obvious answer, and one that already had Poe hanging out the window with his pistol, aiming for the tires of the car just ahead.

“I love a good damsel in distress situation.”

Somedays Ben really wasn’t sure why he didn’t just dump the idiot off in a field when he’d insisted on leaving Naboo with him.

The shot went off and while Ben would have loved to blame it on Poe’s aim when the bullet didn’t puncture the tire ahead of them, he knew that it wasn’t the case. Decent aim and somewhat quick thinking were a couple of the man’s good traits.

“Shit. Bulletproof tires? Who the hell are these guys?”

Ben was starting to wonder the same thing.

“I don’t know, but they didn’t like you shooting at them.”

Ben was glad that Poe seemed to have the good sense to duck when one of the men dressed in black in the car they were pursuing pointed some kind of automatic rifle out the window and started shooting at them. The glass shattered and fell to the dash, and Ben was thinking that he might be more like his father than he was even admitting to for how much every act about his poor car felt worse than anything they could have possibly do to him. In response to the shots, he ducked down a bit himself and swerved to the side, hoping to cut around the car, but finding, instead, that guns weren’t their only worries.

“Fucking hell.”

He swerved to the left, into the path of an oncoming truck, deciding to take his chances with it when he saw that whoever they were following had chucked a stick grenade out the window. He didn’t think that anyone still used those things, but as he swerved back into the right lane, barely missing collision with the truck, he saw hunks of asphalt flying in his rearview mirror like the shittiest party confetti imaginable.

“Oh, it’s on.”

They were still being shot at, but Poe was already hanging out the window again, aiming for the tire a second time. Ben would have called it suicide if it weren’t for his level of certainty that if Poe was good at anything it was keeping himself alive. He still wasn’t sure if the other man was stupid, lucky, or a combination of both, but it had worked out for them so far and he didn’t exactly have the time to question it.

“Hope you like armor piercing rounds you f—”

Ben had to make an educated guess as to what curse Poe had chosen because the sound of the gun firing drowned out his last word. This shot was met with much greater success, as the tire itself shredded into nothing and left the quickly moving vehicle sliding into the left lane and towards the guardrail that was all that divided the road from a steep drop off. One of the few negatives of having a country in scenic waterfront mountainous country was the sheer amount of roads on cliffs, and Ben had never been so happy for it as he was swerving towards the rock face as the other car careened into the metal and blew through it.

He downshifted and pressed the accelerator to the floor to try to catch up to the small silver two-seater that was still speeding ahead. He couldn’t shake the feeling that fate was somehow involved in his being where he was when he was, like he was meant to help whoever the runaway bride was. If nothing else, he owed it to Poe to catch up so he could smile and wink.

“So do you just keep armor piercing rounds in your pocket now or…”

Poe shot him a look of surprise that he could only see in his periphery as they caught up to the smaller car.

“You mean you don’t?”

Ben had to squint against the bright sunlight shining off the car, and the wind in his eyes now that the windshield was smashed didn’t help matters, but he couldn’t see the girl in the driver’s seat anymore and the car was rapidly drifting into the left lane.

“Shit…”

“Who’s the foul mouth now?”

“Poe.”

He didn’t have time for banter as they pulled up beside the car and he realized that the reason why he couldn’t see the girl in the driver’s seat was because she was crouched down, trying desperately to pry at something.

_The brake pedal_.

He realized it with a start. She couldn’t brake; she was trying to pry something out from beneath the pedal.

“Poe,” he repeated, “Take the wheel.”

_This is how I die._

Poe, perhaps a bit too excited to finally drive, did as he was asked, and Ben knew it was now or never when he leaned out the drivers side window and pushed himself into the shattered passenger side window of the smaller car.


End file.
